[popnbrown]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

The first thing you can do is continue to remind your team of how they need to act. In fact, I know many teams ban their students from posting on Chief Delphi altogether. I wouldn't recommend that myself, but having a mentor who follows all your team's posts might be a good idea.

I would be unhappy with a banning of a student from Chiefdelphi. To be honest, CD is one of the first places where I got a negative remark about what I said. My intention was completely not harmful but I could see how I said it in a way that came off as negative. It's been a place not only for me to learn, but to develop a completely different set of communication skills. See that's the really cool thing about FIRST, people who have been in it, understand this is a learning process. We are changing culture and bringing about new ideas, CD to me is a place to make sure that we can look after ourselves and correct ourselves ESPECIALLY high school students, before they go out in the real world, and say some unintentionally negative thing in the workplace.

Likewise, at events, SPEAK UP. Passivity has never changed anything. If a team is being rude, saving seats, etc, then talk to the FTA and volunteers and have them handle it, or talk to the teams themselves.

So this is a good topic, I'm guilty as heck of saving seats. I save them for whatever team I'm in, because a lot of the students are wandering doing their task etc. This touches on a point further on, but I love the spirit and enthusiasm that FIRST allows us to bring. Every single event I go to, I tell the team I'm with, you haven't had a successful competition till you loose your voice (jokingly of course) but EVERYONE takes it seriously. Bringing it back, the reason I save seats, is so that my team can sit together and in the case of Ctrl-Z, be a gigantic blob of orange, with one unanimous voice, just being proud that we have a robot out there moving after 6 weeks of some very tough work.

So while I understand the seats saving cringing, I must respectfully disagree. Of course, I'm usually reasonable and save only the seats I know will be taken up, but sometimes you have to overestimate.

Heck, I STILL see low number teams with flashing lights and sound on their carts, taking extremely loud and obnoxious noisemakers into the stands, and reserving entire sections for themselves.

I'll give the flashing lights and sounds on their carts, even the talking loud. If voice count, then I am guilt again for obnoxious noisemakers in the stands. As a new mentor, I've actually clashed a few times with several people on this subject. My team 1403 has always stood for their matches, it wasn't until I was a sophomore, when we got loud, and I mean LOUD, during our matches. I kid you not, if it weren't for the fun I had my sophomore year at the NJ Regional and the Boston Regional, I'm not sure I would be here. Those two events directly were a cause to my becoming a team captain, continuing the spirit tradition of our team, and pushing that to my new team here.

On that note, to share a quick story and make this post EVEN longer. During the finals at Midwest, (it got heated), my entire team was standing. At this point, we thought we were in contention for several awards, but most of us knew chances of actually winning anything were slim. We got picked, which was super exciting, but we lost in QF. Anyways, we were watching the finals, and I was upset, because as many mentors feel, I knew I had a terrific group of kids and I really wanted their rookie year to be special. Then......I hear a roar of "Red Alliance"...."Blue Alliance"...chant behind me. I turn around it was my team, even though this match meant nothing to them. They proudly wore their really really bright orange uniform and were chanting for several veteran teams, that they've never met till 2 days ago. Their chant actually got a hold of nearby Wildstang, and a far Bomb Squad, who also joined in.

All I can say is, and I'll stick to this for a long time. I could care less about what awards we got, what college these kids go to, how much money they make. What mattered to me, is that for 3 days, all they cared about was having fun, getting out there, learning new things that their mentors have no idea about (Bomb Squad's catapult), and most importantly being passionate. That's what I think is missing from today's world, passion. People do things because it's a good thing to do, but there is no passion. And to see that a bunch of rag-tag group of kids, who most of were forced into this by their parents, develop this passion for being EXCITED about something they worked on and no matter what happened this passion not leaving, totally made my year.

So after a long-winded post, and raising way too many points. I'll conclude with this. FIRST has the potential to be something really really great. IT is about robots, and as a hopefully future-roboticist, that makes me happy but the real truth is that it is ALSO way more than robots.....way more....i feel like i keep saying this.

I wish Will.I.Am, took part in FIRST. I would talk about FIRST everywhere I go (which I guess he does now ).


I'm done for now.